Just had a look at the map around Doha (Qatar). Strangely, each district name seems to be followed by a number in parenthesis. Out of curiosity, I'm wondering if anyone knows their meaning?

Out of consistency... I'd guess that these numbers should not be there. Unless that's really how local people call these places, the "name" tag should not bear the numbers. The numbers probably belong to another tag. Even better would be to have the name tag being written in Arabic as it's the local language... I'd do it if I was able to write in Arabic ;-)

Regarding the "local language": Signs in Qatar are usually bi- or tri-lingual with Arabic and English always present. At least my observation when visiting there was that basically everyone in Qatar was able to speak English while only about half of the people could speak Arabic, due to a very high number of immigrants.